IT APPEARS TRUMP’S SMART ENOUGH NOT TO BREAK WITH HIS BASE HERE: Trump, The Day After: “Respect 2nd Amendment!” “Republicans will face a tough midterm election in 2018, and it may be even tougher in 2020 to hold the White House. Trump’s not going to win converts on the Left by cutting ties with the NRA, but he’ll lose lots of votes by attacking the NRA as a big conspiracy and casting them in the same light as the mainstream media that Trump loves to attack. And Trump doesn’t have that many votes to spare.”

I think Tom Maguire’s theory of what happened is probably right: